Turn a vague feature request into a spec engineering can actually build
Find the ambiguity before an engineer finds it for you, mid-sprint.
- Use it for
- PMs and founders who write tickets that come back three days later with "wait, what did you mean by X?"
A ticket that says "add the ability to export data" reads as complete to the person who wrote it, because they're holding twenty unstated assumptions in their head — which format, which fields, what happens with a million rows, who can trigger it. None of that makes it into the ticket, so the engineer either builds the wrong thing or stops to ask, and now the feature ships a sprint late for a reason that had nothing to do with the code.
This prompt exists to surface those unstated assumptions while they're still cheap to resolve — in a conversation, not in a pull request review.
When not to use this
Skip it for a request you can specify completely in two sentences — export as CSV, this endpoint, this trigger, done. The ceremony here is for requests where you can already feel there's more to it than you've said, which is most of them.
Did this work?
An engineer can read the output and start building without a clarifying question — or the clarifying questions that remain are ones only you can answer, not ones the spec should have answered.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.